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I was under the impression that all the 1960s musical groups had long hair, but here is a band with very short hair.
these guys don't look like what I would expect from a 1960s musical group especially from 1966.
didn't these guys acknowledge the Beatles? not just musically, but stylishly?
they look more akin to young conservative businessmen than a band.
Jack, Long hair for music groups was not prevalent until the late 60s(67 and on) and not all groups followed the Beatles mold. Gary Lewis and the Playboys were considered very syrupy pop. Called bubblegum music in the day. Most bubblegum groups had a squeaky clean establishment approved image. The fact that it takes at least 3 years to grow hair out is most evident when you compare pictures of the Beatles and other groups from between 65 and 69.
peace. -----By the way Al Kooper wrote Gary Lewis' biggest hit This Diamond Ring. He would later go on to play with Dylan and Hendrix,form the groups Blood Sweat and Tears and Blues Project before jamming with Steve Stills and Mike Bloomfield. He then went on to a long solo career! Now perporming with a blues band called the Rekooperators!
peace, jonalbear
It took me a long time to download all 7 parts using dialup (broadband is not even on it's way here ever, but that's another story).
The odd thing is that there is no timeline. The bands and tracks were scattered randomly across those two decades. Some of the pics don't match the date of the track playing, so often the musicians would have had longer hair by the date of the music actually playing. Most of the shorthairs were at the beginning of that timeframe, and you can't tell that. OTOH, there were later shorthairs shown who did soft pop and/or ballads, or who were black artists. OTOH, much of the long hair in the pics is only nominally long, not really long. There was definitely an element of rock stars growing long hair only because they felt they had to for their image.
It all goes back to something that has been said before. Long hair was hip and new in the '60s, but it wasn't long by our standards, as it takes time to grow. By the '70s the hair was much longer, but had become old hat as a cutting edge statement. Some people used this as an excuse to cut it short, but as that was still identified with the establishment it didn't make any statement except "I've sold out to the man", LOL!
It's also true that what people think of as the fifties rock'n'roll decade was more like late fifties/early sixties, and the swinging sixties didn't really get going until a few years into that decade.
Actually, your time-sense is a little off. Early to mid 60's had groups very similar to Gary Lewis and the Playboys. Others from that period would be Bobby Sherman (on Shindig he had fairly short hair; his longer style came later) and Johnny Crawford.
The influence that led to longer hair (in the US ... can't really speak to it on the other side of the pond) came in 1964 when the Beatles came across. Their popularity led to other musicians / groups imitating them - but it took a little time.
By the *LATE* '60s, long hair on musicians didn't raise eyebrows; by the 1970's, it was common.
The Beatles didn't really make it big on the UK charts until 1963, as best as I can remember, which is only a year earlier, when they went straight to number 1. By the time they went to the US they had multiple records near the top of the UK charts, and one Beatles number one hit being directly replaced by another one, without anyone else having a chance to get a number one record inbetween.
Before their big hits they went to play in Germany with DA haircuts and came back to the UK with fringes (called bangs by Americans) after Astrid talked them into these haircuts. She was German and dated bass player Stu Sutcliffe, who died of a brain tumour. I don't think he ever came back to the UK.
There were definitely German beatnik types (called 'exis') walking around with those haircuts before they became known as a Beatles haircut, that's where she got the idea from, but I don't think they were into rock, more like modern jazz. I don't know if the fringed style was a particularly German thing, but some beats would have had shaggy hair by then.
There were other British groups with slightly longish hair by the time the Beatles came to the US, but all the US groups still had DAs or other short haircuts even for a while after that AFAIK. If you're burning with curiosity, DA stands for Duck's A---(posterior)! To get that style the hair had to be grown relatively longish, but swept up and back. Comb it down, snip here and there, and you have a 'Beatles cut'.
Before the Beatles the DA cut signified rock'n'roll, but after them 'long' hair did. The development of the hippies from the beats sort of parallelled that, but I think the German exis were pretty much beats (it probably is short for existentialist), so the Beatles were probably just the first to bring an element of that into rock.
these guys were from the beatles home town of liverpool and had this hit in the U.S. in 1964
looks pretty short to me.
High!
Are you sure that you don't confuse the young Continental existentialists (jazz fans in black polo-necks and cord trousers smoking Gauloises and reading Camus and Sartre) with the immediate predecessors of the German hippies, the "Gammler" ("bums", "loafers")? It happened even before I was born, so all I know about it is from books and older friends, but if I remember correctly, the "Gammler" movement started around 1963/64, i. e. even somewhat before the hippies in San Francisco! Here is a short German video clip from those days (which frightening statements from 'honorable citizens': 'back then, something like them had been burned!' - i. e. gassed in the Nazi death camps!):
http://www.myvideo.de/watch/54037
(the clip probably is from 1965 or even 1966, as the background music unmistakably is an instrumental version of "Satisfaction")
I'm not that much aware when exactly the "Gammler" started to get labelled as "hippies" also in Germany, when "hippies" first showed up in German media, but I think this must have been pretty well before 1970...
I think that it was Astrid Kircherr who identified these guys as exis. Your description of them is exactly what I would expect. I don't think there's any implication that all the exis had what became the Beatles cuts, just those in her immediate circle, and particularly Klaus Voorman, who she dated before Stu Sutcliffe. Also, I think it was more the fringe than any length at the back.
Can't edit here, so I wanted to add that the dates you say the Gammler began to appear is too late, as the Beatles had gone home to England by then.
This will probably give you a better idea of the hair styles of the era. This is a tribute with 10 second cuts of the music from the era with pictures of the bands at the times. Some wonderful music here also.